Digging potatoes on the Alinders’ farm. Sävasta, Altuna parish, Västmanland (now in Uppland). Taken by John Alinder in 1920. Upplandsmuseet, Uppsala.
In rural Sweden, potatoes were a major component of families’ diets, the home-brewed spirits called “schnapps,” and the mash fed to livestock. Everyone in the household participated in the work, which was done by hand in between more pressing farm tasks.
John Alinder’s family and friends were comfortable being photographed on their hands and knees as they dug into the earth with their bare or gloved hands and a small tool to lift the potatoes. They are looking down, rather than up at the camera, and their clothes are dirty. Like most groups picking up potatoes, all were kin by descent or marriage, except for a girl who lived nearby and often joined this three-generation family at work and leisure. Photographs taken across Sweden depict similar scenes of kin-groups at work in their potato patch.
Weeding and thinning turnips. Österås, Floby parish, Skaraborg (now Västergötland). Taken by Gustav Johansson in 1919. Falbygdens Museum, Falköping.
Women and their children predominated in gangs hired to do the manual labor of weeding and harvesting row and root crops on larger farms. But relatively few photographs show all-female groups of farm laborers, although we know from the records of large-scale, commercial farms and estates that gangs of rural women performed heavy seasonal tasks as well as stoop labor.
Gustav Johansson (1884–1937), a farmer and amateur photographer who lived in Floby parish, associated with large landowners in west-central Sweden, and this group of hired laborers on one of their farms may have caught his eye. As they crawl along rows of turnips in a large, flat field, they epitomize low-paid, casual labor. This crew was probably comprised of mothers and their children, but they were not arranged in family groups; instead, they were organized by gender. in some cases, especially in the arable plains districts of southern and central Sweden, these gangs were made up of migrants from other regions of the country.
Weeding sugar beets at Skyllbergs Works. Lerbäcke parish, Örebro county. Taken by Bernhard Hakelier in 1900. Örebro county museum, Örebro.
In this photograph, 25 women and girls wearing straw hats and 15 boys wearing caps weed sugar beets on a large-scale, commercial farm in central Sweden. Skyllbergs Works began as an iron mine, added a nail and wire factory and steel-making plant, and later made electrical equipment. Its agricultural workers were photographed as an anonymous mass, as were the company’s miners and factory workers, but since they toiled outdoors they could be depicted in the midst of their labor. Tellingly, the only adult man in man in this photograph is the supervisor, who is standing erect behind the crew, whose members crouch, sit, or crawl on the ground between the rows.
Bernhard Hakelier was a Russian citizen born in Latvia who moved to Sweden to join his older brother’s photography business. From the 1880s until his death in 1910, Hakelier took studio portraits of military officers and the business elite in and around Örebro, a burgeoning industrial city, and his views of the mines, factories, and estates they owned are almost the only places in which the working classes appear. It is possible that the men in these women’s and children’s families were employed in Skyllberg’s mines and factories, which did not hire women, and lived in housing rented to them by the company or in Örebro. The professional photographer, however, represented them simply as embodied labor power.
